


Blackout

by Taabe



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-06-01 13:02:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6520825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taabe/pseuds/Taabe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The war is over. Ron is wrestling with his own ghosts (and other people's). Dean has an art opening. Sometimes you meet the past in unexpeced ways.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blackout

It was raining the night they met, and Ron dared the rain to stop him. He turned up his collar and stepped off the curb. Slush inched into his soles. The chill shrank his spine. Too many nights sleeping out back then, not so long ago, sleeping anywhere with mud under his clothes, mud too thick to breathe, mud slopping into his mouth until he choked. And no buzz to spare for keeping warm. He saw that he had his wand out. He put it away.

Water ran in the gutters and down brick. He slogged through the drowned scraps of theatre fliers. He passed a kiosk, fat and tattered as a park pigeon. A bus slashed by; he stepped back into shadow. Three blocks to the West Ken tube station. He could go home and see whether anyone showed up. He could get on the first train and ride it. 

Watching people passed a night for him sometimes. He repaired small things they wouldn’t notice. Smoothing out the idiotic ill luck no one should have to stand for got addictive. Then he would listen to the bald woman in the pink baseball cap, the child skittering away from the man with the sweat-stained shirt, the thin man with the twitching hands who looked like too many of Ron’s old school mates — the ones who had surrendered their wands because they couldn’t keep from hexing shadows no one else saw. Damn his father for being right. He hadn’t understood, until his head made him interfere with what magic couldn’t solve. His people didn’t laugh at these folk because they were weak. Their strength shamed him. 

A flier flapped at his face and sleet slapped his neck. Art opening in SoHo. A sketch, chalk on dark paper, of a hand, a head turned away, a body flung over shadowed ground, covered in cloth stiff with clay. Ron tasted mud. Bugger all. He yanked at the poster and couldn’t tear it down. Had he taken a half too many? 

_It’s not about you, chum._ He steadied himself on the kiosk eaves. _The whole bloody world isn’t about you._ Breathe. No other way to stop the shaking. No one was plastering his personal demons across town for a joke. No one cared that much. Get a grip. If a soaked flier wouldn’t tear then —

The face in the mud turned, contracted as the turning pulled at some gash off the paper. He was right. Drawn by someone in the know. He muttered, held up the wand like a torch. Two initials sat like pebbles in the right hand corner: D.T.

He said, “My God.”

Dean Thomas had an opening tonight. What had it been, six years? Harry had let them overnight at Remus’s headquarters. First night in a bed that half year, and food that came out of actual tins. Dean and Shamus had enlisted with Remus after the school closed.

Ron ran, drumming circulation back into his feet. If he got a train immediately, he could be across town in half an hour, and the place should still be open. He only traveled by foot and rail now, methods no one could queer without alerting half the country. On the days he cared about getting where he was going, he remembered the jammed apparitions he’d seen. On the days he didn’t, he wanted the time. When he had to talk sense to a petty official in Carlisle, or a miner’s family when the miner had lain four days in a Cardiff coal pit, he needed the edging of cement into checkerboard, into greenways, into seeps and hawthorne and moorland, to prepare.

It built the pressure, knowing something and having to wait before he could act on it. It made for a lot of headaches, but he got more sleep. Tonight, his head was leaving him alone. He had an increasingly rare chance to kip at his own flat. And was he scrambling eggs over the spirit stove? Was he making cheer on the frigging hearth he didn’t have, because he wanted no faces in the flames and no more doorways than he could watch? No, he bloody wasn’t. 

He skidded into a seat and fumbled change into his pocket. The train pulled away. Bright patches of blank tile passed, and dark lengths of elastic words, pulsing red and orange like night traffic. He breathed with the train in the dark. They crawled and it felt like racing. He was shaking differently. He didn’t often feel like laughing. He let it rip silently and kept from asking anything of it.

The train stopped and he ran again, past the dolphin lamp posts and cockaded statues. He pounded a walk button, sprinted almost under a citröen, flicked silence at the driver. He flung around a corner. There, past the Ace hostel and the cigar shop. He skidded, panting, catching at the plate glass. He grimaced at his slicked hair and ran a sleeve down his nose. The original of the poster sketch stared at him through the window. The head turned toward him. Matted hair stained the blanket. Not a man, he saw, and his hands slipped over the wet glass. A woman. She cracked her near eye, and he saw a glint under her ear. _Padma. What the bloody hell_ — he slid, smearing water over the window until he felt an angle, the slick door knob. The woman turned her head over her chalk shoulder to follow him. His knuckles whitened.

He heard voices and smelled camphor. The room swarmed and nattered at him. At least it was warm. He made himself count the scatter of people in it. Then he closed his eyes, turned to the wall, stepped in front of the first painting, and opened them. He saw soft oils as viscous as the water they’d had to strain through blankets. Two women carrying a stretcher. Their cloaks stuck to their legs, mud or worse. The near one shielded the body on the stretcher from his view. At least he didn’t know them.

He saw a man with a broken jaw hunched over a primus with a wall of muck behind him and a tin can in his hand. Another man read by the light of one of those godawful flares the Beauxbatons used to send up, and a line of dark figures crouched in the distance. Two more caught the lines for a tent lashing out of a downpour. They were all outlines, any shade in the darkness.

Ron did not know he had nearly reached the corner or that his hands were shaking. He did not hear the clock strike or the door close. He stepped right again. Combat. Hand to hand. Two bodies twisted, one thin hand flashing down. _God,_ he thought, _were we young._ The sinews stood on their arms. One wore a coat too big for him. The sleeve slid over his knife hand. Ron remembered that panic, rocks falling, the first man he had ever struck lisping under the blow. Harry had the nads to barge into things like this, damn him. He’d never not been angry. He didn’t know what it was like to go in stone cold sober. 

The two painted bodies fell together. The upper one slashed at the lower face. 

Burning across his eyes. Stinging cold and the unending sleet, his wrist snapped backward and his eyes burned. The crashing flares seared, made him sick. His head — _bugger — Harry — where was —_

“Safe down the line, mate.”

“Sure?” He felt someone standing beside him, still.

“Sure. Have a cuppa. Real tea, and the kettle won’t bite.”

The body beside him waited. He stood, head down. A hand rubbed the small of his back. 

“It’s all clear.” The voice sounded matter of fact. “They’ve drawn back.”

A hand covered the hand over Ron’s eyes. It dropped as soon as he loosened his grip on his forehead. His ears rang. Holy christ, had he lost it? Had he frightened the crowd away? He drew in breath. He knew who was beside him.

“Sorry Dean,” he said to the painting.

“Don’t give me any shit, Weasley.” The hand that had touched his back shook him. His head jerked up, and Dean stepped away. They looked at each other. Tall, too thin, moving their hands. Dean had let his hair grow past his elbows. Bright thread bound the braids and bright chalk smudged his hands. He stood with his weight off his left foot. A dark stain spread over his shirt.

“Wine,” he said, catching Ron’s downward glance. You surprised one of my clueless customers, he didn’t have to say, one who doesn’t know what there is in these pictures to scream about. 

Ron clenched his hands. “Ah shit, like I hadn’t done enough —” he backed away. But Dean advanced and caught his wrist. 

“No shit, Ron. I was there too.” His voice grated. “Look around, man. You think I don’t sodding well know?”

“You know too much.” Ron shifted Dean’s grip to to take his hand. “I didn’t mean to prove it with sound effects, that’s all.” He was still breathing too fast. He gave a quick sidelong smile. The stiffness went out of Dean’s grip. 

“I’ll tie-dye this thing,” he said, undoing buttons to ease the wet cloth away from his skin. “How bout that cuppa?”

“Sure you’ll trust me with it?” Ron looked around. He really had emptied the shop. The chalk figures turned over in their dark fields. Rain streamed over the windows, backlit to a smeared glow. He had an hour before the trains stopped running.

“Hell,” Dean said, leading the way to the light switch, “after eight years, you think you get away with a bloody handshake?”

Ron followed him, glancing at the paintings he hadn’t seen as he passed. The last one by the door froze him solid. A pack of November leaves in moonlight, clawed, skeletal. As he watched, they rose and fell, as though they breathed. A shadow flicked like an eyelid. And those claws — were claws. The hairs stood on the backs of his hands. The shape under the leaves resolved itself into a tattered ear, a silver muzzle. A sleeping wolf.

“I didn’t believe it, you know,” Dean said behind him. “This was the first time in camp. Shay was furious when he saw this. Said I’d disturbed his privacy. But I couldn’t forget — the way I saw him there, and how it dawned on me what I was seeing. He looked starving.” He swallowed. “It’s the only one I have of him.”

Ron turned. Dean’s face was wet. Neither of them said anything. They stood together. Dean flicked off the light. After a while, he dried his face on his shirt. They ducked into the rain and locked the door.

Dean drew Ron into the next doorway and up a dark stair studded with gum. Ron watched car lights swerve over the ceiling and tried not to let the snick of the key chafe him. Dean flicked his wand at the light and closed the door behind them. 

He had one long room under a slanting roof. Ron hung his coat on an antique cast iron coat rack with feet and his scarf over a wicker chair. Dean had an easel set up under a sky light and paints and charcoal stacked in a tool box beneath. His kitchen seemed to be a counter on the far wall with a primus, a sink and a drainer full of colored glass. He had lighted a wide iron ring over the central table. Magic did make period lighting easier to manage. Whatever he had burning lit every corner of the room. 

Dean crossed to the futon in the near corner. He stripped off the stained shirt and lofted it into a basket. Light rippled down his arm to the tips of his fingers. He put his hands to his jeans and hesitated, looking over his shoulder.

“What?”

 _Don’t stop for me._ Ron realized he was staring at Dean’s back, the unscarred flesh below his shoulders. The pause dragged. If he had only made the joke it would have been all right. Too late now. He shook his head to clear it.

“Tea?” he tried.

“You in some kind of hurry?”

“No.” He leaned his knuckles on the table and dropped his shoulders back. “No hurry.”

“You seen anybody?” Dean lit the primus. “How’s Harry?” The wick wouldn’t catch. Dean whacked his wand against the counter and muttered.

“He stops in.” Ron looked at his wet boots and began unlacing one. “When business is too good. This Auror stuff. I can’t ask, you know. Ginny and I have a flat in Mile End. We’re neither of us in it much, so it made sense to go halves.” He flicked a glance up. Dean was fielding two pottery mugs and a kettle smoothly. 

“I think he’d have cracked on his own,” Ron said, tossing his boots into a corner. Harry banged in at random, wanting a hit or eight scrambled eggs or something to read with pictures that didn’t move. He stayed a day or a week and did the dishes, until Ron caught him scrubbing the same spoon for half an hour.

Dean tossed him dry socks. “Ginny’s ok then.” His voice held even.

“Ginny’s ok.” Ron laughed. “I don’t see her enough.” He pulled on the socks. He kept laughing, a dry catch, shaking his head in admiration. 

Dean said, “I know,” then as Ron turned, “Dry feet. Still amazing, isn’t it.”

Ron dropped his hands into his pockets. He wandered over to the sketch on the easel. His breath hissed. A long silver shape lay beside a stone wall, like and unlike the broken bodies downstairs. This one lay on dry grass, and his beard caught on the stones. This one was old. He still wore the starred lenses of his half-moon glasses.

“You saw him?” It came out in a high whisper. Something banged over the floor behind him. A hand-thrown mug too heavy to shatter.

“You think I had to _see_ it?” 

The lash of the reply swung Ron around. Dean retrieved the mug and slapped it onto the table. “Fuck you, Finn McCool. Can’t us mortals give a damn?”

“I don’t —” 

“We were bloody doing homework!” Dean swept his hand down. Veins stood in his forehead. Ron let his objections die and waited. He knew about hotheads. 

“We’d just come from dinner.” Dean paced the length of the table. “You lot had gone off. We were used to that. We thought you were visiting Hagrid or raiding Honeydukes. We never knew. Shay tried to tell you how it was once — you all would slip off, and before we knew you’d gone we’d hear another story about how you weren’t dead yet. It wasn’t real then.” 

He stopped. Ron leaned forward, not challenging. In the face of his quiet, some of the defiance left Dean. “Hard to believe now.” Dean looked up. “I know you all thought we were a bunch of jack shits. Afterward, we believed it.” He wiped a hand across his forehead and dropped it, a gesture as unthought as lighting a cigarette. 

“No one sounded a bloody alarm, mate. The DA hadn’t done anything in a year. Dumbledore was back. We heard a few bangs, thought Peeves was taking the piss.” He spoke mechanically. He must have run through the ledger every day since. “We sent Colin, finally. When you all didn’t come back and Nick told us the upper corridors were dark. He came back half an hour later. Said McGonagall looked like death and he couldn’t see you. You know Colin. The _Prophet_ ’s never got over losing him. So we played snap with the kiddies. It was all over again, whatever it was.”

They held each other’s eyes.

“Never thought of telling anyone anything, did you?” Dean said. It might have been a question. 

“Never had time,” Ron said in the inflectionless voice he used for telling people the universe was about to take an interest in them and fair didn’t enter into it. “Just ran toward the noise. Mostly I didn’t get there.”

“But you ran.” Dean looked down slowly. He seemed to be examining Ron’s fingers as they lay overlapping a knot hole. “You were always so sane, and you still ran toward the fireworks. I still thought the _magic was insane._ ” He turned in relief toward the whistling kettle. 

Dean asked about Hermione. She was fast on her way to Prime Minister. Ron had dinner with her whenever he was in town. Ron asked about Seamus. He had taken over his father’s transport business and upgraded with the help of a night bus mechanic he’d met in the ambulance corps.

“His hand doesn’t matter there,” Dean said, clamping his own about the hot water tap. “And of course Neville comes by.” Ron nodded. Neville was good at coming by, not too often but often enough to keep up. How he got the time away from St. Mungo’s Ron didn’t know and didn’t ask. He reached an arm over to the mini fridge.

“Grab a beer,” Dean said, “or something for the tea.”

There was a pause. Ron took out the milk bottle.

Dean said “it’s ok if —” and Ron said “It’s not —” he shrugged. “I’ve had some tonight and — you heard.”

“You weren’t squiffy.”

“No. . . . Look, sometimes my head goes off without me. When I drink, it’s worse.”

He’d tried a bender after his head first exploded and found out drink didn’t stop the sights — it only disconnected him from solid ground and kept him from knowing how to drive them out.

“Pull the other one.” Dean tore a packet of biscuits across and balled the wrapper.

“Fuck it.” Ron slapped the fridge closed. Was there something he had to lose? Well, beyond dry socks anyway. “I’m a seer, Dean.”

Dean went still. If he hadn’t kept in constant motion since they came in, Ron might not have noticed. Dean turned and came across with the biscuits. 

“So am I,” he said. “That’s not what you mean though, is it.”

Ron picked up a biscuit, broke it and examined the edge. He thought of the images in the gallery, squirming in the dark. Who was he to rate one compulsion over another?

“Might be,” he said. “Only I see forward as well as back. Maybe you do too.”

“Warmer up here.” Dean sat on the futon. Ron looked up at him, felt a smile pull again, shrugged and laughed shortly. He scrambled up. Dean handed him a mug.

“Will you look at this?” Dean grinned. “Official combat veterans with Earl Grey. Aren’t we supposed to be shooting up in cammo?”

Ron clinked their cups. “It’s a free country.”

They drank. Dean talked about his painting and Ron about his talking, the pieces they were drawn to jangle together. Dean said at least his demons let him stay in one city. Ron’s was a hard life to share. Ron spread his hands.

“I got tired of people who wanted me to have a different scar. And there’s this.” He tapped his open right eye. It chinked under his nail. Dean tried not to glance at the lancet-shaped scar below the point of the eyelid.

“What happened?”

“I learned a lot from Alastor in a very short time.” He half grinned. Dean leaned behind him to put his cup on the table. He touched Ron’s shoulder on the way back. 

“Don’t worry,” Ron said; “the other one works. I’m no effing Tiresias.”

He could feel the warmth of Dean’s bare chest at his back.

“You sure of that?” Dean’s voice lost traction. Ron felt him draw breath.

“If you put it that way.” Ron whipped his head over his shoulder and kissed Dean before he could dodge. He was ready to laugh at the bluff. Dean didn’t dodge. His hands gripped Ron’s hair. Ron reached back to cup Dean’s head. Dean kissed his ear and the point of it, his neck, the join of his shoulder — Dean’s hands splayed over Ron’s chest. Ron’s hands shook. He dropped his head back against Dean’s shoulder. Dean kissed him, harder. The shaking spread. 

“Shit. _Shit._ ” He gasped and stared forward, gripping Dean’s arms across his chest.

“Easy,” Dean said with his forehead at the nape of Ron’s neck. He drew Ron more firmly against him. “Ain’t goin’ nowhere. Take your time.”

Ron felt himself racked with laughter on top of everything else. He couldn’t steady his voice. “God, Dean, it’s not that. I’ve wanted —” his breath caught — “since, hell, since I knew why I was so pissed at Ginny for having you. But.” He tried not to look down at himself. His blood was rising. He didn’t know whether anything else would.

Dean tightened his grip. He breathed out slowly. Ron closed his eyes and felt the breath on his neck. 

“My God. Ron. Man.” Ron felt him quiver. Something edged his voice with a warmth like grief. “My god. I may be no better.” The arms across his chest shook him, gently now. “And you know, I don’t even care. You know what?” 

His voice hummed in the dark below Ron’s ear. Ron felt himself rocked and he knew Dean’s face was wet again. He pressed his head back against Dean’s. “Yeah?”

“You know what I want?” Dean reached up to tip Ron’s head back.

“What?” Ron said into his fingers.

“You no farther than this. For as long as you’ll stay. I want you in my head instead of them.” He hunched a shoulder at the the sketches on the wall. “Bugger the rest.”

If Ron had had his eye open, he would have seen the hum fade out of the abstracts and the portraits turn their eyes downward. But Ron had pressed them both back onto the futon. 

“You’re on.”

Dean moved a hand to flick the lights down and smiled as Ron protested. He pulled the blanket around them.

“Mind you,” he said, “I’m not setting any limits.”

Ron turned over, lifted Dean’s head to fan his hair over the pillow, and kissed him squarely. Dean slid his hands under Ron’s shirt to the back of his neck.

“Why’re you wearing this thing?”

“Victorian beaurocracy. Get the buttons, will you?”

Dean’s hands flattened over Ron’s shoulders and again rubbed his back. Ron lifted Dean’s head, kissed his neck, pressed his face to Dean’s throat. He had forgotten how time passed in this quiet darkness, how his breathing changed with the breathing against him, a hand shaping his head, a foot rubbing his. He lifted when Dean’s ribs expanded, and each exhalation seemed minutes long. 

“Beats me why people rush this,” Dean said, kissing both his eyes. 

He pressed his forehead to Dean’s, brought up his hands. Suddenly still and small, he took Dean’s head in his hands. He felt Dean taking hold of his silence, the silence behind the jokes, and closed his arms. They held each other, tight and still, too quiet to breathe. He lifted his head. His lips moved over Dean’s jaw. Dean found his shirt buttons and slid down to kiss him as he worked each button through. He kneaded Dean’s shoulders. Dean ran his thumbs over Ron’s nipples. Ron moved his fingers over Dean’s temples and the scalloped rim of his hair line.

“You know I finally watched a football game?” He tried for lightness, but Dean moved his mouth and he missed. “Quidditch still has something on it,” he managed as Dean lifted his head and lowered it again. 

“Yeah?” Dean muttered into his chest.

“Yeah.” He slid down Dean’s zipper. “It’s got four balls.”

“I owe you for that.” Dean shoved his shoulder, pulled him close, kissed him until he breathed out and pressed the small of Dean’s back. 

“You still a keeper?” Dean drew Ron’s zipper down and worked his hand in. Ron touched his wrist. He slid out of his shirt sleeves, and Dean slid both arms around him. They gripped. Ron felt the blood flowing under his skin. Half clothed, he felt bare. He shivered. Dean pulled the blanket tighter around them. He slid his hand down again and took Ron in it, rubbed him gently to warm. Ron dropped his head to Dean’s chest.

“In my off time,” he said. “Don’t draw me.”

“Only this way.” Dean drew his free hand along Ron’s ribs, then circled him with it.

“Right, man. Right.”

**Author's Note:**

> Rambling around my computer this week, I discovered some fic that predates the AO3, from my grad school days, when book 7 had not yet come out and I would take a break from writing workshops to play with unexpected pairings ...
> 
> I wrote this story in the fall when I wound up almost by accident in a class on Fitzgerald and a survey of 1920s British literature — and started to learn how little I knew about the First World War. People were pointing out just how similar the Potterverse could be to those years between the wars. And Sanj had just suggested that Ron might develop unexpected talents in this direction. So I owe her for this story, and Paul Fussel's essays, and "Not So Quiet" and a lot of conversations about life in the trenches.


End file.
